Monetizing customers in India: a different angle

Is user generated content made in India working with Adsense?

[pgross]

(This is a two sided coin and I have posted the same post on the Adwords forum with no response. I would be interested in updated opinions on the sell side of this equation too.)

While this question has been answered loosely before on this forum, the thread is quite old and my question is a bit more complex.
Is it worthwhile to acquire customers India for a consumer generated content play?

Background: We have a free web service that allows non technical users to create rich web sites and blogs. We have been running an adwords campaign that is globally targeted and has been bringing in lots of customers. I noticed that our budget was being chewed up early in the US day but google.com.in and this was reflected in our sign-ups. Fearing that the lifetime value of these customers would be less monetizing with Adsense given Indian online trends, we turned off India (actually ROW) from google. Not surprisingly, our average CPC went up and to fulfill our campaign targets we need to raise our max bid. That won't do it without raising our daily budget beyond where we want to spend.

So I am questioning our wisdom here? We make money through adsense clicks based on the content our users generate. Do you think that the Indian population will be valuable in the near term in this regard? Does anyone trust ad scheduling enough for us to only run our ads in India after we have had the run of business in the US?

Thoughts?

Paul

[caran1]

No, CPC for Indian audiences is low, since most advertisers provide free services. Also there are very few direct advertisers, most advertise through SEM firms.